The Blog Lives! And Now Partnered!

Hi all, I know many of you have reached out to me wondering where my posts have gone! Well, I’ve been spending a LOT of time over at HowToPriest.com as I am an admin over at H2P. Additionally H2P has been the home for both my Disc and Holy Guides all expansion long. H2P is a great community for priests of all specs. As of today, all future posts will be at www.howtopriest.com/blog The H2P blog will have all original content, cover ALL THREE SPECS of the priest class, and include articles by the admin and moderation team at H2P as well as guest posts by our Senior Members! Additionally the H2P Blog will be the exclusive home for all new content (and many old/high traffic/reference material from) Tales of a …

Update on Heroic Throne of Thunder Raiding ...

I’ve been pretty quiet as of late on the blog, but I hope to do some more visual posting. Firewalls at work have ramped up preventing me from doing ANY editing at the office— but video posts are always more fun I think. I’ll be posting a retrospective post in the coming days… but until then here’s a little treat!

5.2 Discipline Guide – Thunderstruck!

Now yes, we know 5.2 is just riddled with tons and tons of AC/DC references all over the internet… so why not one more? Sorry! I have updated my 5.2 guide which can be found in full as well as discussion over at HowToPriest.com here. The Holy Guide will be updated in the next 24-48 hours, although it has minimal changes from 5.1! (Grrrr….that irritates me on a number of levels. Holy’s shortcomings being overlooked). Hope everyone is enjoying the Throne of Thunder, stay tuned for the Holy update, as well as a State of the Union 5.2 in the next week. Keep calm, and keep healing.

Holy and Disc Best Practices

Inspired by a post by my good friend Vixsin, I’ve decided to do a quick “Best Practices” post. In the interest of full-disclosure, she did toss me an email while I was at a work conference asking for a “best practices” quick hit-list… and I promised her I would do it…. several times. But, I simply let work get ahead of me and forgot to email her back… so, my dear Vix, I apologize! Hopefully this helps somewhat! But before I dive into the meat and potatoes of the post, I will provide a brief update on myself: it has been a chaotic January for me. Work has been quite busy with a lot of travel, my SO and I are on the property hunt here in Boston (Rant: SO …

Keep Calm and Keep Healing

Despite having a crazy busy month both in game and out, I’ve spent some time reading at the official forums, the HowToPriest.com forums, Twitter, and a number of emails I have received… and there is a very large negative cloud over the healing priest community right now. These negative statements seem to mostly revolve around our output (both as Holy and Disc) as well as our mana regeneration. First let me just say… In all seriousness, people need to KEEP CALM. The state of the priest is not as dire as some of the forum posts I have seen might suggest. Perhaps the biggest question I am seeing all over forums (official forums, H2P, and otherwise): Why are priests so under-powered and horrible right now? This. Is. A. Fallacy. I am sick of …

Mana Regen vs Throughput

Mana management is a huge part of our game now in Mists of Pandaria. Gearing, gemming, enchanting, and spec choices will be pivotal in how your longevity impacts these first few raids— particularly since so many of these fights are much longer than we have typically seeing in Cata and even WotLK. Endurance will be just as important as our raw output– or will it? To find out that answer you should be asking yourself these questions: 1. Am I spec’d into the most appropriate regen model for this fight? Are you struggling to find gaps to fit your PW: Solace in? Are you getting fewer than (in aggregate) 8 Solaces per minute? Would Mindbender work better for you? What about FDCL? 2. Are you using your potions at an opportune time? …

Mists of Pandaria: Initial Impressions

First I am excited to say that my Goal of Hitting Realm First! Priest was completed! That was only one-upped by the fact that I also shared Realm First! 90 as well. My friend, guildmate and hunter, Esoth, was Realm First! 90, but delayed his final quest turn-in nearly 40 minutes while my 5 man team struggled with some of the final gather X# of items quests and were getting screwed with the RNG drops.— and we all dinged 90 and shared the Feat of Strength within 30 seconds of each other. Overall the grind to 90 was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the excitement in guild chat, mumble, and my 5 man team. We were done in 13-14 hours if I recall– not too bad. (I didn’t look at the time …

Stay Healthy During Mists of Pandaria

Yes… I am planning on staying up until I hit 90. I am going for Realm First! Priest with a few of my other guildies going for their realm first classes as well. Being a Bostonian, this means Mists launches at 3:00 am local time for me– certainly a daunting task. I will, however, be sleeping a full 7 hours before launch, so I should be IRL “Well Rested”. How much XP will we need to burn through? As of a few days ago, the total XP you needed to go from 85 – 90 is: 97,500,000. (source)… yikes! What is most important if you are staying up late (or as the case may be: early) to grind to 90 is to take care of yourself! Expansion launches are often a time …

Holy Word: Sanctuary – Scaling in Mists...

Holy Word: Sanctuary has been a spell that has been in flux since its introduction at the start of Cataclysm… and that continues to happen even on the Beta– HW: Sanc has undergone a few changes in preparation for Mists of Pandaria, one of which Ghostcrawler commented on from a question I posted in the Beta Class Feedback Forum. ”Sanctuary should scale with haste like Efflorescence. It just adds more ticks.” Well, I must say I was pretty darn excited! It didn’t make sense that it didn’t scale from haste previously. I quickly logged into the beta to test out the breakpoints I had previously calculated and to see these additional ticks at work… But wait… they added Haste scaling, but took away mastery’s scaling from HW: Sanctuary. Noooooo! I …

Chakra and Why You Should Be Concerned

I don’t like writing posts like this – and by that I mean posts where I completely disagree with the direction the development team is going with the priest class. That said, I do believe and trust that Blizzard can develop and balance their game correctly. The development team for Mists of Pandaira has been really good at communicating this beta, and the number of blue comments on the beta forums seems much greater than before. (GC has been great at engaging us.. as well as the CM team on Twitter as well. I have to tip my hat to them there). However, it doesn’t mean I love every change that they make… and sometimes, its important for us to point out changes that could be missed… and I do …

Priest Resources

With account hacks/keylogs being a topic of much discussion, I wanted to recap what happened to me this past weekend… It was a dark and stormy night… Ok it wasn’t stormy, but it was dark – I went out last night for Margaritas with some friends, and we found out one of them plays wow… we all wind up back at my place, so my friend Anthony asks if he can see my account. Sure. I try logging in, put my authenticator password in… Invalid.

Prayer of Mending is unique in the way it operates. It is completely unlike any other spell that is available to any other classes. Not only can this spell be used as a “Where the hell did the tank run off to” leash, it also adds an incredible heal to your healing arsenal. Places a spell on the target that heals them for 1043 the next time they take damage. When the heal occurs, Prayer of Mending jumps to a party or raid member within 20 yards. Jumps up to 5 times and lasts 30 sec after each jump. This spell can only be placed on one target at a time. How can we get the most out of this spell?

There’s no denying that both leveling and gear acquisition has become drastically easier over the years. It’s become the norm for most players to have one or many alts – hell, I’ve got 6 80s myself (4 of them healers *flex*) . With BoA gear and the RaF program, I have friends that swore they would never play an alt, much less a healer, coming up to us the second they hit 80 on their priest and asking what they should do now. Really, the answer to that question can be simple or complicated, but who likes simple? NOT ME!!! So I’ll try to lay out the basics, and try to provide some guidelines based on what I’ve learned over the years.

The blog has undergone some major plastic surgery! We commissioned Lassirra from The Hunter’s Mark to create us this fantastic theme and she did a great job. She also helped me set it up. With the WP platform we have a lot more tools available to us that will help make the blog better, easier to read, and easier to find the articles you want to read. Feel free to make comments on this post about what you think about it. We’ll be making a few changes here and there, so stay tuned over the next few days!

I’ve updated my UI. Though the first incarnation earlier this weekend I FORGOT to include my Saved Variables! (DOH) This version should work for those following the installation instructions. Please go to the Derevka UI section of the blog to get download instructions. You can comment on that thread, or email me at derevkapriest@gmail.com. Don’t miss a single post! Remember to sign up for our RSS feed.

Well… after fighting with laggy US-Bloodhoof all last week, and subsequently trying to complete Putricide Phase 3 with 8 second GCD’s… we went in tonight and bowled him over! Here’s a video I made of our kill. Remember, a larger screen and high def version is available at YouTube. Please comment and rate this video! REMINDER! The blog will be moving to WordPress and will have a new theme! During that transition period the URL might go on and offline. Don’t worry we’ll be back, it may take a day for it all to sync back up! But we’ll continue to be using www.talesofapriest.com and RSS feeds should continue to work! As always please remember to subscribe to both of our Twitter feeds here: Avalonna and Derevka. Don’t miss a …

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog explaining how you should approach applying for a raiding guild. One of the biggest things I stressed was DO NOT LIE. Don’t. Don’t even think about. It will almost always bite you in the ass. There are a million ways to verify in game accomplishments, past guilds, name changes, server transfers – all and more can be found using tools such as the armory, web sites that track changes…or something as simple as creating a character on the realm of a past guild, as was the case here. I’m standing around in Dalaran, waiting for raid invites to go out & playing with my beloved Monkey Ball trinket when a random level 55 Death Knight named Eloras sends me a tell, asking …

First I want to share a video I made this past weekend after I finally decided to go out and buy Sony Vegas. (I got a steal on Vegas 8.0 at Best Buy) that shows off my UI in action, as well as plugs Avalonna and my guild. (We are looking for a Holy Priest, Holy Pally, and a Hunter!) I hope to have my UI uploaded and available on the site here, as well as over at WoWInterface later this week! You can also view this video over at YouTube and clicking here to see it in Full Screen/HD or in a wider view as well. BIG BLOG NEWS!!!

Last Tuesday was a month in the making: the next wing of Icecrown finally opened! Raiders everywhere rejoiced, people prepped their raid groups, got their consumables, and marched into Icecrown… yet for some reason we all were surprised that we were hit with absolutely ridiculous server lag. After all these years of content releases, we continue to be amazed at the amount of fail the servers can be. While Avalonna and myself play on one of the oldest servers that is housed on one of the oldest data centers, we probably should expect it. The Plagueworks is the next wing in Icecrown Citadel. It is not too dissimilar from a lot of Naxxramas: complete with Abominations, Slimes, Decimate, and bosses that yell at us if we kill their pets!

It is my opinion that if you have to install only one mod as a priest healer, it is Clique. Clique is very similar to mouseover macros, however it is a bit easier to set up, assign keys and buttons functions to, and can have saved profiles for different set ups or for different specs (i.e. PVP vs PVP). If you aren’t familiar with the benefits of being able to just have your mouse over the raidframe of a target and clicking or shift-clicking a mouse button to have the spell cast, instead of clicking to target that player, then hitting your hotkey for that spell – you really should give it a try. Further you can keep your current target while still mouseover healing another. Very handy.